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Level With Me is a series of interviews with game developers about their games, work process, and design philosophy. At the end of each interview, they design part of a small first person game. You can play this game at the very end of the series.

Liz Ryerson is a game developer and composer based in Oakland, California. She did music for Dys4ia, Crypt Worlds, and MirrorMoon EP. Most recently, she made Problem Attic, a 2D platformer about real and imaginary prisons. Oh, and she also blogs about level design in Wolfenstein 3D and Doom, among other things.[some talk about Indiecade and festivals that honestly wasn’t too interesting; but then we started talking about an “indie scene”…]

Liz Ryerson: Yes. I’ve always felt like an outsider. I’ve always had this notion that I have to “make it.” It’s been hard for me to realize that it’s more about just doing what I like. I still have this idea that there’ll be this “big explosion” where everything will fall into place for me, but maybe it won’t happen.

RY: I was at one event where my friends heard someone gasp, “oh my god, that’s Robert Yang.” Am I a D-list games celebrity now? Explosions are bittersweet, it’s weird to realize when your dynamic in a community is changing, especially when you used to feel alienated from that culture, or maybe when you didn’t but now you do.

LR: Well, I’ve been trying to write things that are critical of game culture. To an extent, I want some people to look at me with, like, disdain —

RY: [laughs]

LR: … but at the same time I also want people to say, “oh hey Liz!” Deep down, I think I’m usually willing to talk to anyone. But sometimes people aren’t even comfortable talking about these things. There are things that you can’t say, there are these rivalries…

I was fairly active on a site called Overclocked Remix for a period of time, and back then I knew DannyB, who did the music for Super Meat Boy, etc. Most of the reason I got involved with indie stuff was because DannyB was saying, “you should totally do music for games, it’s great.”

We all still see each other and talk, but when we do, it feels awkward. The more I speak out against this culture, the more I’m alienated from them. Not just DannyB but also Disasterpeace, and Ben Prunty (who did the music for FTL) used to be a big fan of my music. I don’t dislike them, but it feels like there are things you can’t say around them… because they’re successful? I don’t know exactly how to put that.

RY: I get that. But is it unfair to expect that it wouldn’t be like that? Isn’t it like that anywhere, with anything?

LR: Kind of. There are people who care less about money, like Michael [Brough], or us… I mean, I care about money on some level; I’d like to not have to sleep on the floor of my friend’s house. But as far as doing what I want — I feel pretty good about that.

RY: I’m probably not going to quit my day job anytime soon. Making and selling games isn’t going to “sustain” me in the way that it does for others.

LR: That’s part of why I tried to start writing about games. And then I got depressed. I decided that if I really want to do this, then I need to make it work, and my idea of success is being able to pay rent somewhere in the Bay Area if possible, which is really expensive.

Maybe I should focus more on my music and performing? I could DJ and perform and get money from doing that. Also, I’m doing music for a few games, and I might get a small percentage from those. I feel like my own games aren’t going to go anywhere. It’s overwhelming and depressing, and I’m just trying to get out of that mode. Like when I write something very critical, do I have the strength to keep going and not doubt myself? It’s hard.

LR: I hope so. I’ve made lots of plans. I’m going to go to a bunch of games events. I’m going to be around, I’m going to be visible. The end result of that can’t be bad anyway? Just showing up is important.

RY: I like that. “Just showing up is important.”

LR: But a lot of people can’t afford to do that. Either they don’t know the right people to help them out, or they don’t have the money (which I don’t either)… You also have to be in the right place in the world. Like, if you’re in Europe — there are games events in Europe — but you’re more likely to miss other events like Indiecade or GDC if you don’t have the budget to fly over [to California.]

RY: But the indie culture there in Europe is nice too. When I went to GDC Europe last year, it felt different somehow, like we were all talking to each other more.

LR: Less of a competition?

RY: Yeah, maybe?

LR: I like Bay Area indies, and obviously I like Anna [Anthropy’s] games, but I feel my approach to design is more similar to UK indies like Increpare or Terry [Cavanagh].

RY: I like a lot of the UK indie work, and how they handle abstraction and complexity, but at the same time, I feel like I could never make games like that. Like your Problem Attic? It asks so much of the player. I could never make a game like that.

LR: My perspective’s changed a lot, even in the past few years, in terms of what games stimulate me? Initially Braid was that game for me, but also Yume Nikki. Have you played that?

RY: No.

LR: It’s an RPGMaker game. (My theory is that the author might be trans, but they never specify a gender and that’s only a theory.) Anyway, you play as this little girl in her apartment, and the only thing you can do is to go to sleep. Every time you sleep, there are all these different doors to different parts of your subconscious. The first few stages are these very abstract maps that loop on themselves and you just wander and collect items. Gradually, things get less abstract, and more suggestive of what the girl is going through.

My games are influenced by that: Responsibilities is about wandering in a hellscape of your own making, and Problem Attic has some basic platforming but after a while you gain the ability to walk through walls sometimes —

RY: Why sometimes?

LR: Well, it’s hard to explain. [SPOILERS FOR PROBLEM ATTIC:] There’s a part where the title screen repeats again, except it’s in a different color and it glitches out. Some people thought that was the end of the game when it was actually only a third of the way through. And then it sends you into the walls, back into the overworld, and the first stage — in it, there’s some text that says, “Go fuck yourself,” which felt like the right thing to say — and then you realize the screen wraps too. There’s some sort of build-up that goes on. You end up going through all the previous stages, but with different solutions. I don’t think these are that random; some people have completed the game, I know these puzzles are solvable.

I want to suggest something that you know on an intuitive level, but not on a conscious level. Maybe like David Lynch’s work — upsetting but in a way that you don’t exactly don’t know why. Now I feel like I’ve spent a lot of time on making this game and most people aren’t going to get past the first half hour.

RY: I was one of those people. Sorry.

LR: No, it’s fine, a lot of my friends were those people. My goal was to submit Problem Attic to Indiecade and a lot of festivals, but I realized it’s probably not going to be understood. The presentation is kind of weird and maybe “amateur-ish”, which puts some people off. Again, Michael Brough makes Corrypt and all these amazing games and has these people say it’s brilliant but the graphics seem so amateurish, even though his style is so completely realized in a lot of ways… And if they don’t get that, they’re not going to get my work either. They don’t see it. It upsets me that this thing that I made is just going to disappear. I want to make more stuff, but then I get so emotionally invested in it.

RY: If people aren’t getting it, is that a sign to maybe… compromise, a little?

LR: I think people have to go into my game while also wanting to go into my game. You need a certain state of mind, you need to want to play a puzzle platformer where all you do is jump.

RY: But your game isn’t just a puzzle platformer. It’s a “hellscape” characterized by uncertainty that “makes you upset and you don’t know why.” People have an idea of what David Lynch offers them, but here, is anyone going to say, “boy howdy I feel like getting upset for some unknowable reason, so I’m going to go play…”

LR: When Lynch released Eraserhead, it was this big midnight movie, a spectacle. I feel like the things we react to in games, are very much on the surface, and there’s no space for Increpare-style freakouts? Like if there’s just a few things that are “off”, then players dismiss it and don’t look any further. I’ve written blog posts about this but there’s only so much you can do.

RY: I’ve written those posts, and I’m sure Jonathan Blow has written posts like that too. “Don’t you get what I’m saying with my work? Why aren’t more people playing this?” Then I think, if everyone in the world is saying my game is not that good, then there’s a strong possibility that it wasn’t really that good? Isn’t that the most direct explanation?

LR: I don’t agree. Maybe it just means you’re not around the people with the right mindset and you should find those people. There’s also oversaturation, where some people get really cynical about things. I wish I wasn’t so cynical. We need to get work outside of a bubble of game designers who filter work from a technical perspective, we need more emotional response.

RY: This is something I struggle with, and something a lot of indies (and, uh, all humans) struggle with — in the absence of spectacular success, how do you know if you’re making good work?

LR: Your work is good if you’re satisfied with it and if you’re not a sociopath. If you made something that expresses what you wanted it to, and people don’t appreciate it, then maybe it’s because they don’t have the right lens to appreciate it. You should offer them a lens. When people make fun of Jonathan Blow for doing that, I think I actually empathize more with him, that feeling that no one else is really getting where you’re coming from.

RY: That seems true to me. I usually want to be understood… but do you think, like, Michael Brough cares whether people understand him?

LR: I don’t think he does. There’s plenty of stuff that the current culture isn’t going to recognize right now.

RY: I wish I could be more stoic like him and ignore my desperate need for validation.

LR: Me too. I’m in the same boat.

RY: We should meditate more.

LR: That’s what David Lynch does! He says it “increases his capacity to understand.”

RY: I’d like to talk about your Wolfenstein 3D criticism, which I found really powerful because I remember it as a game about running into rooms and shooting, but it’s actually a tactical stealth puzzle game?

LR: I exaggerate those qualities a little. The variation and depth comes more from the sheer amount of levels in this game — 60 levels total. That’s a lot of levels.

RY: But it was only 3 chapters of 10 levels each, at first?

LR: Well, all of it was made roughly at the same time. They just split it into two parts more as a marketing thing. Each level was also made very quickly.

RY: They made one level a day, right? That’s soooo fast.

LR: But if you ever made a Wolf3D level before, you’d know that’s possible. Tom Hall and John Romero also designed the Commander Keen levels, and those were made really quickly too. I think that philosophy goes into what Wolf3D is and how it works. They just did it.

RY: Now, the popular legacy of Wolfenstein 3D is…

LR: It’s mostly based on the first episode of the game, the shareware episode that everyone played. The first episode is very different, design-wise, from the rest of the game. It was all originally going to be a stealth game, and the original Wolfenstein was a stealth game too. You could drag bodies around. And I can see in the first episode that a lot of the levels were built to support that; they’re big, with a lot of areas that kind of look like a castle that could exist, maybe? These massive prison labyrinths that have a solution path that ignores 75% of the level.

Then, I think with the other episodes, they decided that it was more of an action game. And that sort of freed them in a way, to let them do crazier designs than in the first episode. So naturally the people who played only the first episode, they focused more on the fact that you could walk around and shoot people from a first person perspective.

RY: I also didn’t know you could strafe in Wolf3D. To me, that changed the dynamic of it a lot. Suddenly you’re not limited by the slow turning speed. Your relationship with line of sight is different, you can “slice the pie” around a corner.

LR: Well, a lot of the strategy just involves opening a door, shooting in the air, and then waiting for the guards to come to you. But in the editor, you can make the guards deaf so they can’t be baited, so that you have to walk in and clear the room piece-by-piece. There’s a really good example of this in E5M1 by John Romero.

There, the last room is a hallway where you can see the exit door right in front of you, but there are also all these alcoves with deaf guards. There’s a temptation to run forward, but you can’t here, because you actually need to edge forward slowly and clear out the guards. “Can I go further yet or can I not?” I think Romero had more of that kind of thinking about level design than Tom Hall. It’s more about putting the player in these tactical moments.

RY: But doesn’t that seem random and inconsistent, or artificial? If I shot into the room and saw no soldiers come out, then I would assume there are no soldiers there, and feel like the game lied to me randomly? You can’t do that today.

LR: They put enough deaf guards in earlier missions that you know they could still be there. Presumably, the backstory is that these guards just don’t want to abandon their post. In the end, none of this backstory really matters, but I like that there’s this historical premise with a wacky design philosophy that, oddly, seems appropriate at the same time.

LR: Yeah, and it’s disorienting because there’s no frame of reference to know where you came from. I could tell some parts of the map involved Tom Hall thinking, “oh, that’s a cool idea,” and putting that in.

He plays a lot with expectations. This level also has a lot of stuff on the side that seems significant… like there’s a silver key. In one of the main menu recorded demos, you can see the demo player pick up the silver key. So when you play, you pick up the key, and then go through a couple doors, only to realize that key doesn’t work there. Maybe it opens something else? But it actually doesn’t open ANYTHING on the map.

RY: It’s totally useless.

LR: In any other level, it would’ve been important for some secret, but not here. I like the idea of looking for a secret that isn’t really there. A lot of people would say that’s bad design, but here it was just so intentionally done. I doubt he just forgot to add a silver door for the silver key. Regardless of the intent anyway, this was the end result. There’s also a huge grid of lights. What the hell is that? Even the decoration of the room makes you question what is going on.

RY: You feel really vulnerable.

LR: Yeah, and when you step forward, some officers come out and shoot you, and you can’t even see them before. That’s the philosophy of design in, like, every Doom level.

RY: To me, the grid of lights was maybe the designer saying, “I know this is making you nervous, and something bad is going to happen.”

LR: In Doom there were so many moments like that, where you pick up a key and then a trap door or trap wall opens with monsters. It happens so much. Some Doom mods do a good job of deconstructing your expectations that way.

RY: It’s a conceptual framework for surprise.

LR: It’s still a very game-y framework though. You still know every level involves you picking up a key to get to the exit to get to the next level, and nothing is going to happen in-between that to put that in jeopardy.

LR: Right. The fact that this very important key was behind a secret door — that was pretty strange. But even then, you know there’s an exit that goes to the next level. The episode won’t suddenly end or put you two levels ahead. The set of verbs remains pretty constant. I think that’s why a lot of gamers are comfortable with variation but not disruption. In Mario games, you know you just basically have to collect powerups and then run and jump to the exit.

What really surprised me was in Deus Ex 1, when you get captured in a prison, then escape, only to come out of a door that you never really noticed in the other side of the UNATCO building. It was a weirdly significant moment for me. The narratives and the rules were all being called into question.

RY: Yeah, it’s interesting when these kind of rules and patterns get broken? I thought I was going to just keep going back to UNATCO HQ to report, to brief and debrief, in that pattern, etc.

LR: I tried to like Deus Ex 3, but I gave up on it.

RY: It was okay. It always had a stealth path, a conversation path, etc. and everything was well-lit and clearly marked and knowable. Maybe the problem was that Deus Ex 3 rarely broke its own rules.

RY: Okay, so let’s talk about what you’d like to add or change in this game…

LR: Hmm. Well, the world you start on is very blue, and then you go to the red planet — and what if the red planet turns everything red? You could just grab onto the planet and then it sends you —

RY: Wait, like, grab the planet through the periscope?

LR: Yeah, that seems like the most intuitive thing to do here.

RY: I’ll put an invisible lever on the front of the periscope, so it’ll seem like you’re grabbing the planet.

LR: And then you’re in this red version of the room you were in before.

RY: How will the player know they can do all this? It doesn’t look like the other things they’ve been grabbing.

LR: It could play a sound when the planet is centered. And also your cursor will change. I think that’ll be enough? And then it could make a woosh sound! And send you into a red sandy desert-y version of your old world, the room with the periscope. And in the other direction, there’s this bright light, and that’s as far as you can go. There will be all these windy sounds or sand sounds. You can also see another periscope that looks like the one you just used, but you can’t get to it. You can see it through a window?

RY: And when you see it through this window, you’ll try to walk to it, but you end up walking into the light?

LR: And maybe the light “takes you” sooner than you can get there. If you’re close enough, and you look into it, then it automatically just goes woosh —

RY: — and “takes me.”

LR: Yeah. And make it so you can’t see the light until after you’ve seen the other periscope? I don’t know. It doesn’t matter.

20 Comments

I like her music but when I played Problem Attic, I didn’t feel upset or alienated or uncomfortable, and I’d wondered if it had just been me. I just felt bored, like it was under-designed. Not playing it with the right lens seems like an excuse if so many people truly aren’t getting it. It’s up to creators to tighten what their art communicates. Her frustration with the game’s reception is understandable but I don’t like when creators take that frustration out on the people who try to connect with their art. Thirty minutes is a lot of attention to receive from someone …

I must say I also bounced off Problem Attic (and I only got the name pun like last week I AM NOT WORTHY OF RPS) but her analyses of Wolfenstein levels are pretty excellent. At least I thought that as someone who never really played Wolfenstein.

I’ve enjoyed all your Level With Me interviews very much. I especially like your style of transcription and editing, and how it brings out the personality of your subjects. It’s nice when your subjects have personal blogs, too: I’ve stayed up late more than once to read through all the interesting links. Thanks!

I don’t think “compromise” is the right word. You’re really looking for a more accessible method that achieves the same result. Why is difficulty necessarily a marker of integrity?

Filmmakers like David Lynch are not difficult through and through — often they begin with a conventional generic anchor (like the murder mystery in Twin Peaks) that leads to stranger territory. Philip K. Dick novels often begin with a pulpy premise ripped from the trashy science fiction that was in vogue at the time. And speaking of Increpare: he did the same thing in his early narrative puzzle games like Mirror Stage and Opera Omnia.

Problem Attic just doesn’t seem like it wants you to continue — in fact, it deliberately misleads you into thinking the game is over — and there’s isn’t enough variation or even small reward after that. Some small concession to audience expectations in the early game could have allowed for very difficult experiments after that. And it would have all hit a larger audience.

Gave Problem Attic a go after seeing it recommended by Anna Anthropy (I think).

I actually went back to it quite a few times, I wouldn’t had it just been a random link. The mechanics seem obtuse and arbitrary. Success is as much a function of luck as it is puzzle-platforming.

Michael Brough’s work is low-fi and glitchy, and it allows players to solve things in their own way. But games like Corrypt have clearly defined mechanics, and those glitches are by design. When you figure those out, it feels rewarding and satisfying.

It seemed like what she was trying to get at was something like: If your work achieves what you want it to achieve, it is good. Insofar as you want approval, that’s how much the players need to like it for it to be good.

The connection to sociopathy, I think, is because sociopaths “don’t care” about the feelings of others? Which isn’t really accurate; what makes a sociopath is the disconnect between emotional expressions and how you feel inside. It means that the disapproval of your players would not make you feel worthless–but if you had decided you wanted their approval, you would still be disappointed. Sociopaths can feel disappointment.

I like the Level With Me series but this interviewee seems to be labouring under the illusion that a work is inherently infallible and any problem with it is the fault of the audience, not the author. With that attitude it’s hard to take her opinion, or her work, very seriously.

It seems more like the interviewee is against the idea that there’s a checklist of “good design” (which in many cases simply means being accessible and inoffensive, rather than actually “good”) and anything that doesn’t fit that list can comfortably be written off. As opposed to actually analysing it and seeing if there’s something deeper to it not following those rules.

That I can agree with. Breaking with convention can lead to interesting things, but there is an assumption there that being accessible is somehow ‘lesser’, which frankly is some industrial strength bullshit. Being impenetrable isn’t deep and uncompromising. It’s just bad communication.

And blanket dismissing criticism with “you just don’t understand my art” is a lazy cop-out.

I mostly agree, on the other hand, when someone is making something that intentionally breaks from the norm I think it’s a somewhat natural reaction to have when the default form of criticism is to write it off just for not following the accepted standards without even trying to engage with it (I haven’t played Problem Attic and similar so I’m only talking in general).

While more accessibility is mostly a good thing, in several cases (at least with current styles of game design), it pretty much inherently leads to less depth, the problem being that many people aren’t willing to acknowledge that. That’s especially notable for small indie games and similar that don’t have to chase after as big an audience as possible like AAA games try to, and therefore can explore less accessible design that does things high-budget titles can’t (or believe they can’t anyway).

Not infallible. If they’d be under that impression they’d probably be far more arrogant and less insecure about it. But when you want to make games as art, as expression (as well), then it makes sense to stick to your guns more than to make things accessible to the point of compromising the vision, the main idea which was the core of the game to start with.

Not that this always makes for great games, but it is a valid approach. But not as likely to lead to a solid income.

What a great interview! I find Liz Ryerson to be one of the most interesting people currently thinking about games. Everything she writes is hugely illuminating and thought provoking. It’s a treat to find her featured in Level With Me.

Separately, is there any way to save progress in Problem Attic? I saved a copy of the webpage to play offline but I can only play games in short snippets so I have not been able to finish it.

It’s frustrating to me to see the dismissals of Problem Attic here, but I also understand why they’re predominant. The problem with using glitchiness as an aesthetic/game mechanic is that most people will assume that you did it on accident. This is a particularly easy assumption to make in Problem Attic’s case since the first third of the game doesn’t offer any counter-evidence. One could make the game more accessible and immediately appealing by front-loading that content, but only at the cost of harming the overall narrative arc of the piece.

Frog Fractions had the same problem, sometimes, and was far less subtle. Even some very intelligent game designers glanced off of its surface without finding the real game underneath.

Problem Attic not only uses transgressions against a game’s implied rules in a way that is successful mechanically, it uses this largely unexplored mechanical space in a way that is successful aesthetically and narratively as well. This is an astounding accomplishment, but one that requires a lot of faith in the author and overall games literacy to understand and to access. Don’t feel bad if a lot of people don’t ‘get’ your game, Liz: That’s only the cost of trying to say something very specific in a very particular way.

You’re bending over backwards in an attempt to pull success from the glaring failure pit the game finds itself in.

Yeah, there are those who thought Passage was literally one dimensional (left-right) as opposed to two dimensional. This didn’t stop the audience from getting it. Ryerson suggests in her blog that Passage would not find the audience or praise had it been released now, because the indie scene now demands eye candy. This is bullshit, Passage would make it any day, so would Candy Box. – link to ellaguro.blogspot.co.uk

Other designers, such has Brough have managed to convey glitchy mechanics in a satisfying way. Speedrunners have been making mechanics out of glitches since forever.

Problem Attic fails at this. There is no consistency to the game’s logic, each puzzle/stage is arbitrary, it becomes a bug hunt, which is less satisfying than a QA job at Zynga. The player doesn’t think, “I solved this”, they think, “I found the hoop the designer wants me to jump through”.

How is it successful narratively when most of the players think it ends a third of the way through? I’m at a black screen after the “ringing” stage, and have no idea whether it’s complete. The only message that the game conveys in screen after screen, is that there’s a very good reason why all these rules she’s breaking were rules in the first place.

You break all the rules of cinema by pointing the camera at a wall instead of the action. Despite the particular way of delivery, the specific thing you’re saying is irrelevant.

Is it really that hard for you to believe that I was genuinely affected by this game? Is it really more plausible to you that I would bend over backwards to defend someone I basically don’t know, that I would hunt down an interview with a developer that I have no other reason to know of or care about than the presence she extends into the internet through her work? Is that more plausible to you than that I genuinely believe this is a good game?

The problem with conveying glitchy mechanics is that it’s inherently unclear whether they are intentionally glitchy or not. A designer can make the intent more overt, but I wouldn’t call that a better approach, since being overt in communicating the intent of the glitchiness undermines the very thing it’s trying to achieve. It emphasizes that everything takes place within a sandbox, rather than forcing the player to wonder whether they’re breaking the game in a way that was intended or a way which was entirely their own. Problem Attic lets the player believe they are breaking the game in a way which is unintentional for the first third — which is why, incidentally, this first third is indispensable — and then proceeds to require the player to exploit what they’ve learned to solve the otherwise-unsolvable later levels.

It contextualizes this into a story about transgressing against gender and societal norms, how we’re lashed out at and how we lash in at ourselves, and becomes a story about the power of violating these imaginary and illusory boundaries we constrict ourselves by.

I don’t think a narrative has to communicate itself to everybody to be considered successful. I think that train of thought leads itself to a race towards generalities rather than specifics, a race towards the blandly digestible rather than the personal, the isolated rather than the contextualized. Not all games are for everyone, and, unfortunately, due to the nature of this game’s aesthetic and narrative, its audience is limited. So it goes.

I won’t say I never got frustrated with the game. I won’t say the experience was entirely un-bullshit. But, in a story about the shit we have to put up with, why should the player be spared from putting up with shit? The moment when I realized, after 10 minutes of frustration, that something had shifted, that instead of being forced through the boundaries of positive and negative space by happenstance and by sneaking through cracks I could do it at will– that was powerful. I felt something. And I won’t let you or anyone else imply that I made that up out of some flimsy ideal of indie cred or whatever.